Publisher's Description

Plex Media Server seamlessly connects your Plex clients with all of your local and online media. The combination of centralized library management, streaming of online content, and powerful transcoding functionality provides an unrivaled level of flexibility and ease of use.

NEW: Massive performance improvements in scanning engine. We took things apart and put them back together again, and scanning should be much faster. Like much faster. You'll notice it especially when scanning item-heavy sections like music. Speaking of music, we just pushed an much-improved Last.FM agent as well. Oh, and we also pushed a new Scanner which fixed an issue reading ID3 tags. So lots of love for music this release.

I have a Roku on one of my older TVs which I couldn't justify replacing just because of HD etc. I did want netflix on this set and missed the feature that AppleTV offers in letting me play movies and music from my Mac. Plex lets me do just that.

Cons

The initial setup was a little complicated in the server finding all the songs and movies I directed it to, but it does let you set how often it rescans the library. The Roku didn't automatically find the server. I had to enter the IP address.

Summary

Once set up, this worked as advertised and I am able to view my Mac's videos (not from iTunes store) and music library (again, not iTunes bought) on my older TV using a Roku. Bliss.

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Full Specifications

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What's new in version 0.9.6.5

NEW: Massive performance improvements in scanning engine. We took things apart and put them back together again, and scanning should be much faster. Like much faster. You'll notice it especially when scanning item-heavy sections like music. Speaking of music, we just pushed an much-improved Last.FM agent as well. Oh, and we also pushed a new Scanner which fixed an issue reading ID3 tags. So lots of love for music this release.

NEW: Support for Virtual Scanners. Up until now, Plex Scanners have been limited to scanning the files directly, but with Virtual Scanners you can be much more creative. We've included an example (the Plex iTunes Scanner) which is a quick and easy way to scan in your iTunes collection much more quickly than using the regular music scanner. In under 50 lines of code, too.

NEW: Other metadata loading/saving performance speedups.

NEW: Location header exposed to CORS requests.

NEW: Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderDefaultDuration) for specifying default duration for Flash/Silverlight videos. Useful for videos that exceed two hours in duration.

NEW: Added a new advanced preference (TranscoderTempDirectory) for specifying the temporary directory for the transcoder. Useful for all those with SSD drives.

NEW: (DLNA) Add support for device matching on serial number and manufacturer fields. Really, guys, did you implement the spec in a slightly different way on purpose? Just to mess with us?

FIX: Music scans refreshed artists/albums for no good reason, again and again. Think of it like a nervous golden retriever which kept poking the dead squirrel. Bad dog. Sit. Stayyyy.